- If eternal returen is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, and we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an imagine of life/s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leve of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose weight or lightness?... That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.
- We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come... There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
- What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
- Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
- Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).
- To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
- A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
- "Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (or compassion) or not.
- We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the "Es muss sein!" to our own great love.
- For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her harm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago.
mar 16 2013 ∞
mar 16 2013 +
mar 16 2013 +